Hugo dos santos wins the 2025 may sarton NH poetry prize
Selected by Anthony Walton, here is the announcement:
In a literary moment when so much lyric poetry seems preoccupied with private experience and ready-made epiphany, Hugo Dos Santos’s Reduction in Force is revelatory. It is, yes, an examination of the self, but it performs its review through lenses and landscapes that are rarely utilized in poetry, which is to say the cold and bureaucratized reality of the American corporate world, and the ways that world can affect and pressure the individuals and families who attempt to build their lives under the dominion of those companies. Dos Santos maps the experience of a true believer who must come to terms with the betrayal now inherent in what used to be known as the American dream and work through the humiliation of starting over. He does so in poems that are consistently surprising in content, satisfyingly varied in form and tone, and utterly, winningly, trustworthy to the reader. I haven’t seen anything like this book before, and it heralds the arrival of an original poet, with the promise of more originality and excitement ahead.
Reduction in Force will be published by Bauhan Publishing in the spring of 2026.
The Self Is a Book Made of Expanded Memories: Jose Luis Peixoto’s Homecoming
A review of Homecoming in World Literature Today.
“Homecoming, translated by Hugo dos Santos (Arquipélago Press, 2024), is a collection of poetry that oscillates between different genres; it is poetry, it is travelogue, it is autobiographical creative nonfiction, it is deeply reflective philosophical inquiry.“
“The links between time, lived experience, memory, literary writing, and the very idea of self constitute the central axis of Homecoming. The collection was written during the Covid-19 pandemic when the author, like most of us, felt trapped, suspended in an arrested present seemingly without end. In those silent, heavy days, Peixoto waited, mourning a future that seemed uncertain. As Peixoto writes in the poem “Quarantine”: “Overnight the hour changed and yet / we remained in yesterday’s time / Since this Sunday is so rare, we cannot / guarantee that tomorrow will be Monday. / The future has wandered off into the calendar; it exists / beyond what we can see through your window” (11). This arrested time, without a guaranteed future, forced the poet to reconsider the importance of poetry in its relation to deep emotions and the processing of lived experience, leading him to write this book.“
Read the full article here.
A huge thank you to Irene Marques for this generous review.
arquipelago press publishes homecoming, poetry collection by José Luís Peixoto and translated by Hugo Dos Santos
A poignant meditation on isolation, grief, and kinship by one of the most celebrated voices in Portuguese literature.
In his latest collection of poetry, José Luís Peixoto, writing from the confines of his home during the height of the pandemic, embarks on a journey through his memories. Captured in a deft translation by Hugo Dos Santos, Homecoming is a tender evocation of a familiar world — a world of friends and family, beloved pets, small villages and busy streets — suspended in time. Like Ulysses on a perpetual voyage, Peixoto explores the essence of a room’s four walls and turns his gaze inward, journeying to places near and far but always leading back to the heart of it all: home. Memories serve as guiding stars; he recalls moments from his childhood, his time spent writing and collaborating with translators, and the freedom he once had to travel.
These poems evoke the gravity of life without falling into despair. In turns sombre, joyful, tender, and elegiac, the journey ends with the last poem that gives this work its name, Homecoming. “Here I am again. Ready for Sunday dinner.”
JOSÉ LUÍS PEIXOTO is one of the most acclaimed and successful authors of contemporary Portuguese literature. A poet, playwright, and novelist, he has received numerous awards for his writing including the prestigious José Saramago Literary Award. His works have been published in more than thirty languages.
spuyten duyvil publishes the collection then, there by hugo dos santos
“a startling, poetic vision . . . . an honesty that makes our hearts sing. These characters pursue ‘the little freedoms,’ and the constriction of their dreaming tells us, with artistic force, how terribly we have made one another invisible.”
—Katherine Vaz, author of Saudade, Mariana, Fado & Other Stories, Our Lady of the Artichokes & Other Portuguese-American Stories, The Love Life of An Assistant Animator
“a whirlwind collection of short and micro ghostings . . . . And humanity always painted with a delicate stroke, fleshed out large in all its flawed beauty.”
—Kia Corthron, author of The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter
“unflinching and heartfelt . . . . Then, there gives us Newark, if Newark were home.”
—Annie Liontas, author of Let Me Explain You
“These tough, beautiful stories draw to human darkness, not simply to tell us what we already know, but out of a belief that we can’t see light without walking with its twin. . . . a dazzling, lasting achievement.”
—Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship
“. . . a hypnotic book . . . . a transporting book . . . . It feels like one long love poem and reads like a thriller.”
—Alice Dark, author of Think of England and In the Gloaming